I recently bought myself a new laptop, for university work. The laptop came
with Microsoft's Windows XP pre-installed. After unpacking the machine I
immediately started installing Linux. At least, I was planning to
immediately install Linux.

After leaving my parent's house to start living on my own, I didn't take all
my CD's with me. (After all, what use is a CD when you have fast internet, I
thought).
Big mistake, I found out the laptop didn't have a floppy drive, so my
planned installation with a couple of floppies and a network connection to
Slackware collapsed. So I went to the local bookstore, to see if there
was a Linux magazine with a distro included. And yes, just that month Linux
Format (from the UK) came with a real Slackware 8.1 DVD, bootable. I've been
using Slackware for a while on the desktop, and like it a lot, so decided
this was going to be my laptop distro as well.

USB works very good after recompiling the kernel, with USB support in
modules, and support for human interface devices, so I can use my USB mouse.
The laptop uses UHCI usb controllers, so load usb-uchi, usbcore, hid, input
and mousedev, and the mouse should work.

Networking can be achieved using the standard Realtek 8139 card (wired lan)
or the internal Intel 2011B card (wireless lan).

The Realtek cards works simply with the 8130too module (rtl8139 for
2.2.x), and works fine. A bigger problem was to install the wireless card.
For WLAN cards you'll need some tools and modules, available here.

This package contains tools and modules for your wireless card (Prism2
based). After loading the correct module (PCI, PCMCIA, USB), you can use
some 'iw*' tools to configure them:

The laptop specification sheet told me it should be fully ACPI compliant.
Well, the stock Slackware 2.4.18 kernel came with APM, so I tried that
first. Typing in 'apm' gave me a message indicating there was no battery
present, and working on AC power. So much for APM

I tried APM with later kernels as well (.19, .20 and 21Pre3), but that
didn't help. I suppose the BIOS doesn't do APM

So I started downloading some ACPI patches
from the ACPI page, and patched 2.4.20 with ACPI. Everything enabled, and
after a reboot, ACPI worked great! Battery status, CPU temperature, and lid
status and stuff like that.
Unfortunately, along with ACPI came random freezes. After about 3 ours of
working, the laptop would just freeze, no response on ping's or whatsoever.
So, I thought it had to be ACPI that caused this.

I reconfigured 2.4.18 with ACPI, but now all parts as modules. After reboot,
I only loaded the button module, so I could press the power button to
suspend the laptop. And yes, succes at last. No more freezes, works great.
At the moment I'm busy inserting ACPI modules one by one, waiting for
freezes to see what part is the problem. (I suspect the processor module).

To do actual power management, I have a few options:

Intel SpeedStep: this controls the CPU speed, throtling from 1200 to
1700 mHz. When CPU is idle for a while, it will go to 1200. When using 90%
CPU or more, it will switch to 1700 mHz. This saves battery, and reduces
heat production.

Suspend to RAM: using a simple 'echo 1 > /proc/acpi/sleep' to let the
laptop fall a sleep. I wrote a script around it, that removes some USB
modules, and spins down the harddrive.

Like USB, infra red works great. It uses some modules, a simple command, and
some programs to actually use IR, just great. To use IR, compile your
kernel with support for IRDA, after which these modules will be made:

irtty

irda

To use the IRDA port, find out with which serial port address it's
connected. In my case, on ttyS0, and I add this to my startup script:

irattach /dev/ttyS0 -s

Now the IR port is ready to use. You can run programs like irdadump to
verify this. To tranfer files from and to Windows (9x,NT etc) machines, use
a small tool called ircp.

The laptop contains a simple Intel audio card, and works with Linux. The
sound quality isn't super, but this is the same in Windows. To use the
soundcard, make sure you have these modules compiled and inserted:

I didn't work with the parallel port yet, but I don't see any reason for it
not to work. Same thing for the TV-out, which should be able to put your
laptop screen on TV.

Something about working with the Pacer

Overall, it's a nice laptop to work with, not to heavy, fast hardware and
enough memory. I use Fluxbox as windowmanager, but, with the 512 mb memory,
Gnome 2 and KDE 3.x also work great.

Communicating with other students is done via mail, IM and IR. Mail works
like normal of course, IM done via Gaim, and IR with ircp. I encountered
some problems with ircp. While my laptop was in receive mode, a Windows XP
machine could sometimes not send anything, because I 'denied access'.

Also, for my study, I need to work with SolidWorks, a CAD program. To do
this, I installed VMWare 3.2, with Windows XP on it. This works quite fine,
but needs a lot of memory and CPU power.

Battery life isn't really long. Even while the CPU is mostly in 1200 MHz
mode, it doesn't hold for more than 2.5 hours before sending out a loud
BEEP signal. Recharging is pretty fast, even with laptop on and working.